As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems, including computer systems, typically include storage disk drives and in some instances an array of disk drives. For example, an random array of independent disk (RAID) drives may be communicatively coupled to the information handling system for data storage and retrieval.
However, these disk drives are prone to faults and failures. As such, one or more of the disk may be configured as a hotspare drive. The hotspare drive operates as a replacement drive when a failure of a drive occurs. Thus, the hotspare generally sits idle until one of the drive physically fails which causes the hotspare to be rebuilt as a copy of the failed drive.
Unfortunately, rebuilds can take an enormous amount of time which costs valuable time to customers and factory production environments. Because the rebuild does not begin until the drive actually fails, the system typically has to devote several resources and processing time to rebuilding the drive under a standard rebuild algorithm. In addition to the time and resources consumed during a failed drive rebuild, the potential for loss of data or other information is greatly increased. This loss of data may be very great if the failed drive happens to be in a RAID 0 stripe set.
Smart trip errors or smart trips were developed in the industry as a tool to aid manufacturers in diagnosing problems within the drives. At present, manufacturers use these smart trips for diagnostic purposes. However, these diagnostics are not automatically acted upon by the system, but are only reported as a problem to the user and then ignored by the system leaving the reported problem for the user to repair.